El Cajon aims to clean up ditched shopping carts

EL CAJON  Shopping carts removed from stores and abandoned around the city have become a visible nuisance, many El Cajon residents are saying.

Despite efforts of local businesses to prevent the thefts and retrieve wayward carts, many that have been removed from stores then accumulate in different parts of town, according to a report from Melissa Ayres, the city’s director of community development.

“The accumulation of these shopping carts is aesthetically detrimental to the community, promotes blight, may reduce property values and is in general, a public nuisance,” Ayres wrote in her staff report to the El Cajon City Council.

The city will introduce an ordinance regarding abandoned carts at the council meeting at 3 p.m. Tuesday at council chambers, 200 Civic Center Way.

The proposed ordinance places the burden on business owners to keep the shopping carts on each business’s property. Each business would be required to submit a plan to the community development director with an outline of how the carts will be managed to prevent them from becoming a nuisance.

The director can require business owners to alter their plan if it’s not adequate.

The ordinance, which the city says is consistent with California laws regulating abandoned shopping carts, would also allow the Police Department to stop people pushing shopping carts along the street, retrieve the cart and possibly arrest the person with the cart on suspicion of theft.

The ordinance also allows Public Works Department trucks to pick up abandoned shopping carts around the city and store them in the department’s yard. Public Works staff would notify business owners whose carts are taken of the location of their stored carts, and maintain the yard to allow the owners to pick up the carts during a minimum six-hour time frame.